"It strikes me, Miss, and I'm only a passenger here, but it strikes me your friends up the front have a problem. You get that impression?' She ignored him, wondered what else she could do.
Couldn't hit him, not without coming from behind her barricade, and she couldn't call David or Isaac because they were at the cockpit, and she had seen what the American had, and the two men had looked anxious. 'Perhaps the problem is, Miss, that no one is that keen to have you. Thought of that one, have you? That there won't be a red carpet down there waiting for you.'
'We are Jews, we are persecuted. We are fleeing from a system of intolerance, and so we go to Israel. In the West they are the enemy of the Soviets – you tell me they will not help us?'
Edward R. Jones Jr turned full towards her, eye to eye, face to face. Quite a pretty girl really, if she did something about her hair, bit of make-up, little eye shadow – not a beauty but presentable, dreadful frock, but they all wore things like that over there.
"Have you thought, Miss, that it could all be a bit harder than that, that people this side of the line might not be quite as cosy, quite as friendly as you thought they would?' A rhythm in his voice, monotonous like the drip of a tap that needs a new washer, hypnotizing in its way, and dulling and wasting. 'When the Palestinians fly the planes into Arab countries they get locked up now, you know. No more garlands and a big villa to lie around till the heat cools. They shove them in the cells. Times move on, Miss.'
'We are not Palestinians, we are not terrorists. We are Jews and we have been oppressed, we have been persecuted, and now we have fought back…' She too had now raised her voice, the last of the group to do so, but responding in her own way to a strain that was becoming intolerable, crippled all the time by the isolation of her position, divorced from the others, wanting comfort, reassurance.
They all say that, Miss. All reckon that their God is on their side, that he looks with a friendly eye on their cause.
You're not the first to join this merry-go-round, Miss; there are plenty before you. Proper all-sorts they are-Weathermen, Puerto Ricans, Tupamaros, Zeepa, Provos, Baader- Meinhof, ETA 5, PFLP. They're all in your line of business. And one problem they all face – they need somewhere to go, somewhere to sleep, somewhere where they aren't going to be hunted. Rest* houses are short on the ground, Miss. If you can't put this bird down in Tel Aviv you're lost, you'll be like all the other lepers and pariahs. No one will want you.'
'We are going to land, Isaac told you so. Isaac told you we were going to land. And the plane is now descending.'
Close to shrieking, and the words carrying the length of the cabin, enough to rouse Isaac from far away so that he ran the distance of the aisle, and when she pointed to Edward R. Jones Jr she could not speak because the tears choked in her throat. He seemed to dare the boy, to taunt and anger him in the very defiance of his steadied, aged eyes. Not even the hands raised in self-defence across his face, nor his body turned away that a blow might be warded off. Isaac swung the barrel of his gun in a short, chopping arc on to the apex of the American's skull, one blow to submerge it under the protection of Felicity Ann's arms, and there was blood on heir dress and the sound of the distress of an old man for protest.
'Rebecca, it will be over very soon. We are nearly there. We are losing height. Courage for a few more moments. Courage."
Isaac's was the only voice in the great hushed cigar of the cabin. But he had not told her of the message from the ground, had not thought to. Flaps moving and arresting the progress of the plane, causing it to yaw from side to side, thrust sound changed to a higher pitch, and the rumbling of the extraction of the undercarriage.
The movement of the plane made it difficult for David to stand in the cockpit, but there was nowhere else for him to go. The pilot officer in her seat, the navigator in his, and only the captain's place with the strapped-down body available to him. Couldn't bring himself to touch the man, different if they'd meant to kill him, if he had been an enemy and his death had been reached by decision. But it was just an accident, an empty and hollow accident to a man whose status represented no threat to them. Not like killing the policeman. And so the captain reserved his seat, his head rolling with the motion of the aircraft and the blood trail congealed and darkened.
We are talking again with the tower at Hanover. They repeat that we are not permitted to land there. They call it a blanket order for the whole of the Federal Republic. They are emphatic that we will not be permitted to land there.' The navigator seemingly calm, unaffected by the bow-string tension around him, and repeated his messages as if uncaring as to who heard them, all the time interrupting his recital of instructions from the ground with the minutiae of course adjustments that the pilot officer required of him.
'Another few seconds and we will be through the haze, then we will see the runway, then we will see if they mean to stop us, or whether as your friend says it is just a bluff.' Five years' flying she had had, three more before that at the training school, sufficient experience solo for her to be able to handle the Ilyushin on her own. Too senior really for her to be flying co-pilot, especially a creature like this, but the rosters were not logically drawn and did not always recognize her log book of flying hours. They taught you how to pilot an aircraft, and gave you lectures on emergencies -but those were concerning the technical problems that might be faced – fire in an engine, undercarriage that would not retract, fracture of pressurization, loss of flap control. They did not know how you would react if there was a submachine-gun at your ribs with a thirty-round magazine attached, and a class of school children that you must bring to safety. No way they could know that when they gave you command of an aircraft. Lectures and courses, but this…
There is the runway,' she snapped, peering high over the bottom lip of her windscreen at the dun-coloured strip of concrete thousands of feet beneath her. The city was laid out like a toy town further away. Neat gardens, high chimneys of the factories, rising office blocks. But closer
– and this held her attention – the shape of the airfield, runway placed straight ahead for her by the skill of the navigator.
There are trucks across it. See them? Petrol lorries, armoured cars, suicide, suicide if we go down there.' Without the order from David that had preceded her every previous move she had pulled on the instrument column, and was scrambling to complete the job she would have shared with her captain, to reset the mass of dials and switches that were necessary if the plane were to climb again. David had seen it all, seen it as she had. And he too recognized the impossibility of a successful landing. Every three hundred metres the variation between the yellow and white petrol tankers and the green and olive armoured cars, clear and silhouetted against the background of the tarmac.
'Do not answer any calls for us from the ground, and circle the airport, low enough so that they can see us.' David moved out of the cockpit, the first time that he had left it in more than two hours, stepping into the corridor, the passageway between the flight deck and the passenger cabin. He reached forward to pull the curtain across that the watchers might not observe him as he spoke to Isaac. He spoke in a quiet and sombre voice, and with a resignation about him that unnerved Isaac, and with his shoulders seemingly shrunken by the enormity of the problem.
'What do we do now? In God's name, Isaac, what do we do now?'
'We can tell them we are coming in to land, and see what..'
And if they do not move the trucks, and if we are committed to landing, and cannot climb again – then we are dead.'